Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Correcting the narrative

Ed Balls was on the World at One, taking a bow for the teachers’ pay deal. He again referred to low inflation and falling interest rates – which will not sound at all right to those reading the Telegraph’s splash about food prices rising at the highest rates in history or the 1.6m poor souls renegotiating their mortgage this year.

One of Brown’s key tactics is the fake narrative: cherry picking statistics to cast his years in No 11 in the best possible light. But his official version is now becoming so detached from what people experience and read about that it just sounds fake.

One of the reasons the Swedish Moderates (ie, conservatives) broke years of Social Democrat rule was that they used different metrics. No one believed the government’s claims of tiny unemployment as the Moderaterna’s version, 20% on dole or government schemes, rang truer. The same opportunity awaits the Tories if they set their own metrics, and parameters of debate, rather than just using Labour’s.

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